Too Far Gone

15

Using an electric trolling motor so’s not to be heard by their quarry, Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Officer Elliot Parnell and rookie Betty Crocker pulled up on the eastern finger of dry land, one of two thinly forested and weed-choked tracts that sheltered Ticholet’s shallow bay. The sixty-yard-long bay ranged from a width of twenty-five yards at its mouth to fifteen at the back, where a U-shaped dock, which was anchored on both ends, held the floating cabin in place.

Crouching and moving slowly, Betty followed Parnell to the hidden camera and watched as her superior removed it from the tree with the giddy enthusiasm of a child on Christmas sneaking downstairs ahead of the family to get a surreptitious look at his presents.

The new boat was gone, so their subject was off, presumably doing something illegal. As a kneeling Parnell was opening the viewing screen, Betty realized she was sweating to the point where her uniform was sticking to her skin. The still August air was muggy. She wished the hurricane would come on and push some wind through the swamps. They were supposed to be riding around the camps making sure everybody that lived around the area knew a monster-ass storm was coming right at them, and would most likely deroof and maybe remove any trace of the rickety-ass buildings that dotted the swamps. They were supposed to be helping the Sheriff’s office by making sure all these poor sons of bitches knew staying was dumb as shit. Like the rat-faced inbred scamps that lived back in here ever came upon a smart idea. Everyone they had told said something like: “She’ll turn.” “This camp’s been here through ten big hurricanes.” “If my dog runs for it, I’ll be right behind her.” Most of them were dumb, paranoid, suspicious, and as quick to pull a gun as crack dealers. Maybe no hurricane would be more apt to kill them than it would a snapping turtle. Parnell had been told that the investigation into Leland Ticholet was not a priority, but he had a hard-on for Leland, and that was it. And she didn’t like the way Parnell was always looking at her out of the corner of his piggy eyes. First time he tried to mess with her, she’d be filing one of those sex harassment lawsuits on his fat ass.

Leland Ticholet made Betty nervous. He had a reputation for being erratic and violent, and she doubted he took more than a few alligators here and there. Why risk your butt for critters that were dumb as rocks, mean as pimps, and as plentiful as cigarette butts? Elliot Parnell was the biggest by-the-rule-book asshole on earth and everybody hated his ass. She got stuck with him because the other agents all hated blacks-especially black women who weren’t mopping their floors-and they thought she’d quit on account of being with Parnell. “We have important warning to be doing,” she said.

“This is important,” Elliot told her.

“Whatever,” Betty said.

“We can’t have everybody around here thinking they can treat our valuable wildlife resources any way they like.” As he spoke he was watching the screen, which was reflected in his beady little eyes. Elliot had a handgun, but Betty wasn’t done with her probationary period, so she wasn’t packing. In an emergency Parnell had said she could use the shotgun. Although her father and brothers were too familiar with guns, Betty had never fired one in her life, and didn’t know one Wildlife and Fisheries officer who had ever had to use deadly force. Parnell had pulled his gun on several people, but everybody said it was because he got scared and overreacted.

“Oh, my God!” Elliot whispered excitedly. “We got the son of a bitch!”

He rewound and turned the tiny screen so Betty could share the view. The teeny boat entered the frame and a bald, shirtless man who had yard-wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and muscles that would make an ox jealous tied off the boat and carried, on one shoulder, something rolled up in a sheet.

“See the alligator he’s got?” Parnell said.

“It’s so dark in that I can’t see shit. But it might be I can sort of see something rolled up in something looks like a bedsheet. Why would the fool roll a alligator up in a bedsheet?”

“So nobody can see what it is.”

“Who in the Sam Hill would be out here looking at him? I’m new at this, but wouldn’t a gator’s tail be hanging way out?”

Parnell glared at her disapprovingly. He had a bitch-on because she had never been in the great outdoors before and had just studied how to be an enforcement officer at the community college. Parnell and the others were rednecks and they resented her for not doing it the way they did. She knew they blamed affirmative action for making it so they couldn’t just hire one of their inbred potbellied brothers-in-law.

“You ready?” he asked her suddenly.

“Ready for what?”

“To take a look-see in that cabin.”

“I’m new at this, but didn’t I hear the captain say you need a warrant or something to go searching in people’s cabins? I seem to recall something about it.”

“This tape gives me probable cause.”

“Maybe he’s a Klansman and that was his outfit he had over his shoulder,” Betty said.

“And maybe that’s an alligator, or a roll of gator skins he plans to sell.”

Betty looked at the viewfinder again. She saw Leland getting into the boat and holding something against his head, then throwing it like a baseball and going back inside. In the next few minutes of video he came out carrying a gun, got into the boat, and untied it. As the big man drove the boat out of frame, Betty could have sworn Leland looked right at the hidden secret camera.

“Let’s do this,” Parnell said, as he held out the camera to her.

Betty took the camera and watched as Parnell stood, took his big-ass revolver out of the holster, and opened it up like he was afraid the bullets might have escaped from the cylinder since he’d last checked on them-twenty minutes earlier.